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The Mystery of the Disappearing Day...
Nov. 9th, 2015 10:40 pmI finished off the two large-ish jobs this morning and then promptly got side-tracked with... I'm really not quite sure what.
I eventually got back on track, but it was not the same.
Much of the diverted time was spent digging stuff out of the nooks and crannies into which it has been stuffed. Among the prizes was a paperback copy of Bob Hope's I Owe Russia $1200, which brought back a load of junior high memories.
Specifically, this one year (I think it was during 8th grade), I managed to get myself signed up for a "public speaking" competition, the essence of which consisted in getting up in front of an auditorium full of students and speaking on some subject.
The role played by the Hope book—which had mostly to do with his ongoing travels on behalf of the USO and other projects, and very little to do with visiting the USSR—was as a source for a time-honored (and probalby oldest) trick in the book among performers (or budding performers), i.e., stealing material.
Indeed, public speaking is exactly that—a performance. Likewise is interpretation a performance, be it for an auditorium full of people listening to what a speaker has to say or a single person interacting with a group.
I do not recall the details of my presentation before that audience of my peers in junior high, only that it was a largely fabricated retelling of an encounter with a shark while wading in waist-deep water a quarter mile out from one of the Florida Keys. The purpose of the exercise was not to inform or educate my audience, but to simply tell them a story that would hold their attention for a couple of minutes (something I realized only long after the event).
My talk was received well, as I remember it. And though I did not win that year's competition, I did score pretty highly, if memory serves.
As it turns out, getting laughed off "the stage" (whatever "the stage" might happen to be) has never been something I've been afraid of. Perhaps a childhood filled with the experience of being among the last players chosen for a game of softball—or being roundly ridiculed out for dropping an easy fly ball—inured me to that kind of thing.
Later on, when I was at Borland, I learned even more about public speaking, including how to respond to hostile questions from the press and how to react when all of your props (computer, slide show, what-have-you) go belly-up in front of the multitude.
It's been quite an arc.
Big movements are afoot. Tomorrow is gong to be the day!
Cheers...
I eventually got back on track, but it was not the same.
Much of the diverted time was spent digging stuff out of the nooks and crannies into which it has been stuffed. Among the prizes was a paperback copy of Bob Hope's I Owe Russia $1200, which brought back a load of junior high memories.
Specifically, this one year (I think it was during 8th grade), I managed to get myself signed up for a "public speaking" competition, the essence of which consisted in getting up in front of an auditorium full of students and speaking on some subject.
The role played by the Hope book—which had mostly to do with his ongoing travels on behalf of the USO and other projects, and very little to do with visiting the USSR—was as a source for a time-honored (and probalby oldest) trick in the book among performers (or budding performers), i.e., stealing material.
Indeed, public speaking is exactly that—a performance. Likewise is interpretation a performance, be it for an auditorium full of people listening to what a speaker has to say or a single person interacting with a group.
I do not recall the details of my presentation before that audience of my peers in junior high, only that it was a largely fabricated retelling of an encounter with a shark while wading in waist-deep water a quarter mile out from one of the Florida Keys. The purpose of the exercise was not to inform or educate my audience, but to simply tell them a story that would hold their attention for a couple of minutes (something I realized only long after the event).
My talk was received well, as I remember it. And though I did not win that year's competition, I did score pretty highly, if memory serves.
As it turns out, getting laughed off "the stage" (whatever "the stage" might happen to be) has never been something I've been afraid of. Perhaps a childhood filled with the experience of being among the last players chosen for a game of softball—or being roundly ridiculed out for dropping an easy fly ball—inured me to that kind of thing.
Later on, when I was at Borland, I learned even more about public speaking, including how to respond to hostile questions from the press and how to react when all of your props (computer, slide show, what-have-you) go belly-up in front of the multitude.
It's been quite an arc.
Big movements are afoot. Tomorrow is gong to be the day!
Cheers...
